As early as 1887 (U.S. Pat. No. 361,197), the concept of consolidating scrap iron into a useful fully dense wrought product has been taught by building a strapped bundle of scrap metal, heating the bundle and then compressing such bundle by conventional rolling mill techniques. Infrequent attempts have been made since that time to improve such solid state method of scrap conversion. Some individuals have reduced the scrap to powder first (U.S. Pat. No. 1,453,057) another has initially cold-compressed the scrap metal into billet sized bodies for better heating (U.S. Pat. No. 1,491,392), while another has cold-fabricated bales directly from the scrap metal to be used as a bundle for heating and compression (see U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,211,984; 1,354,492; and 3,744,118), while still another provided precompressed planks or logs of scrap metal which were then eventually gathered into a bundle for heating and compression (see U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,100,537; and 2,457,861), yet others have containerized the scrap metal in cans or sheet metal coffins (see U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,626,578 and 3,626,577) prior to heating to improve the resulting surface finish. All of these improvements have involved the use of costly installations, particularly mammoth apparatus to achieve bundling or baling sufficiently large to undergo adequate reduction in conventional rolling mills. The techniques exhibit an ability to waste thermal units due to the type of heating employed and the concomitant exposure of the scrap metal in the porous bundle. These processes have been such as to degrade rather than enhance the quality and properties of the raw material with the result that the finished product, if one could be achieved at all, was of little commercial value. In those instances where a low quality and intermediate product is desired in comparison to commercial quality blooms or billet, the solid state methods have failed to maintain apparatus and operating costs at sufficiently reduced levels as to be attractive in comparison to conventional methods of processing steel. Moreover, such methods are not adaptable to a variety of different types of starting materials to achieve a variety of selected quality levels in the resulting product.